Friday, March 31, 2017

Geek Highways: Digger's Dungeon

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(This post should properly have been made yesterday. Mea culpa.  I only just now found an online editing tool to make the photo fit for Blogger.)

Unless you're already a fan, this takes a bit of explanation. Dennis Anderson is famous in monster truck circuits for his series of Grave Digger trucks.There's the original to the fore. It was a mud bogger until a monster truck failed to make an appearance at a show and he volunteered to crush cars with his own truck. That sold him.

Over the decades, the Grave Diggers (there have been dozens of them) got bigger,more powerful,and more thoroughly spray-painted with skulls, ghouls, and similarly Halloweeny blue-collar art. And of course, they aged out.

So long as the teams (I think there are nine of them now, making the circuits) needed a place to store and restore trucks not in use, somebody decided to take some of the old truck bodies and make a roadside attraction out of them. Hence, Digger's Dungeon. Trucks, a bit of welder's art, an enclosure with a goat, a pig, and various poultry, strange stuff, and a gift shop where you can buy an action figure of Dennis Anderson.

Anderson had to retire recently, after a failed flip resulted in unspecified injuries. I hope they were minor and he'll make a full recovery. A man who has devoted his life to giving people joy (and, boy howdy, monster trucks do!) deserves nothing less.

You can find Digger's Dungeon in Poplar Branch, North Carolina. In fact, if you're driving through you can't possibly miss it.

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